Let There Be Light

The outstanding third annual City of Lights, City of Angels: A Week of New French Films continues tonight at 7:30 at the Directors Guild, 7920 Sunset Blvd. in West Hollywood, with Claude Mourieras’ risk-taking, ultimately touching “Mooncalf.” A warm, exuberant affirmation of family in the face of extreme duress, by turns comical and wrenching, it takes us to a dairy farm in the French Alps, where a family is struggling to cope with 19-year-old son Julien (Vincent Deneriaz, a college math and physics major--and snowboard champion--who never before acted), who has a learning disability and whose headstrong nature and physical prowess make him increasingly incorrigible and dangerous. The family patiently submits to group therapy sessions, but it takes the unexpected revelation of a family secret to transform Julien’s life. Mourieras threatens to overreach with knockabout antics, but his insistence on taking a comic rather than tragic view of life pays off in a strong finish. Mourieras is scheduled to attend.

In her third film as a director, noted actress Nicole Garcia, in her sleek yet complex “Place Vendome” (Friday at 7:30 p.m.), guided Catherine Deneuve to a best actress award at Venice for her acute portrayal of a beautiful woman drowning in drink who pulls herself together when her husband (Bernard Fresson), a renowned jeweler, kills himself in the face of mounting business reverses. Garcia’s co-writer, Jacques Fieschi, and cast member Emmanuelle Seigner are scheduled to attend.

Michel Ocelot’s “Kirikou and the Sorceress” (Saturday at 1 p.m.) is a work of animation of elegance and simplicity, inspired by a West African folk tale in which a tiny but precocious boy demands to be born, only to emerge in a village in the thrall of a vengeful sorceress.

This year’s festival ends with Patrice Chereau’s wonderfully titled “Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train” (Saturday at 7:30 p.m.), which recently won Chereau a Cesar for his direction of a large ensemble cast. (Cesars also went to cinematographer Eric Gautier and supporting actress Dominique Blanc.) Chereau is scheduled to attend.

Chereau’s film is about an eminent Paris painter who dies at 70 and whose final request is to be buried in the family plot in Limoges. The painter, also a teacher, Jean-Baptiste Emmerich, was clearly a man of exceptional charisma. He left several generations of male lovers, and a goodly number of them converge at a Paris train station to make the journey for the artist’s burial and subsequent wake at his baronial family estate, presided over by Jean-Baptiste’s brother Lucien (Jean-Louis Tritignant), who, apparently no square himself, is more than a little intrigued with Viviane (Vincent Perez), a beautiful pre-op transsexual.

These are people of emotional extravagance, but they force one another into a series of self-confrontations. Chereau’s film is surprisingly unpredictable, compassionate but never indulgent, brisk and spiked with mordant humor.

(310) 206-8013.

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The first Los Angeles Festival of Italian Film concludes on a high note tonight at 7 at the Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, with Maurizio Sciarra’s beguiling “Sirocco,” a sparkling, sensual romantic comedy in the effortless style of the Italian classics. Giancarlo Giannini, too long absent from American screens, stars as an anti-fascist Sicilian marquis forced to pose as his own butler at his grand palazzo, to which a young peasant couple (Tiziana Lodato, Francesco Benigno), earthquake victims, have been assigned temporary housing. While the cloddish young husband eagerly awaits the Mussolini dictatorship sending him off to Abyssinia, his beautiful and sensitive wife cannot help but be drawn to the handsome, sophisticated aristocrat, a man of wit, civility and infinite charm. You can’t help but envision Vittorio De Sica and Sophia Loren in this irresistible comedy, yet you come away grateful for the splendid job Giannini and Lodato have done. Paolo De Vita co-stars as the marquis’ hard-pressed attorney. (323) 936-4528.

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The American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theater, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., launches at 7 tonight through Saturday “Silver Apples of the Moon: The Films of Guy Maddin” with Maddin present for the premiere of his “Twilight of the Ice Nymphs.” Shelley Duvall, one of the film’s stars, has described Maddin as being “like Jean Cocteau, Luis Bunuel and Orson Welles all rolled into one childlike man.” That’s a pretty apt description of the Canadian experimental filmmaker, a master of pastiche who spins gossamer-like fantasy adventures with an exquisitely refined high camp sensibility. Among the offerings: an 8:30 p.m. Saturday double feature, “Archangel” (1991) and “Careful” (1992).

“Archangel” is a kind of crazed cross between Sergei Eisenstein and Kenneth Anger. Set against the Russian Revolution and World War I in a remote snow-covered village called Archangel, it is a heady tale of confusion caused by mustard gas and, apparently, shell-shock. A Canadian lieutenant (Kyle McCulloch) mistakes a Russian nurse (Kathy Marykuca) for his dead love; she in turn confuses him with her Belgian aviator husband (Ari Cohen), who keeps forgetting he’s married to her. So much for the plot; what’s important is Maddin’s witty, knowing evocation of vintage movie kitsch.

A fanciful, absurdist celebration of early cinema, “Careful” is set in the 19th century in the Alpine village of Tolzbad, where silence is truly golden: The slightest sound can trigger a lethal avalanche. The repressed villagers seem in fact to be suffering from terminal quaintness, but all this changes when the young Johann (Brent Neale), who has just become engaged to the demure Klara (Sarah Neville), has a dream in which he imagines himself seducing his sleeping mother (Gosia Dobrowolska). Even though we eventually learn that the dream is actually a manifestation of the longings of his dead father, it’s enough to trigger an avalanche of emotions and kinky shenanigans.

There’s no questioning Maddin’s unique vision and his talent in expressing it. Low budgets are a plus rather than a minus for him, for they spur Maddin, who is also his own cinematographer, production designer and editor, to seemingly endless resourcefulness in creating wondrous fairy-tale images. One hitch: 100 minutes is too long to sustain such preciousness. (323) 466-FILM.

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Philip Rodriguez’s “Manuel Ocampo: God Is My Co-Pilot,” which opens a one-week run Friday at the Grande 4-Plex, 345 S. Figueroa St., downtown Los Angeles, is an informative 62-minute introduction to the Philippines-born artist who arrived in L.A. in the mid-’80s and, after a series of odd jobs, was soon able to support himself with his work, much of which is marked by macabre religious imagery, dark humor and social and political protest. Ocampo arrived at the right moment, when the concept of multiculturalism began to flourish, and he’s now moved on, geographically and creatively, to Seville.

Ocampo himself emerges as smart, wary, especially of the high-powered art world establishment, contemptuous of cant and very much his own man, beholden to no one except perhaps his wife, who serves as his buffer to the world. He sees his work as of the moment yet suggests that a painting is never finished in that its meaning and significance may change as people look at it over the course of time. Ocampo will participate in a question-and-answer session after the Friday 8 p.m. screening. (323) 617-0268.